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NASA Space Telescope Maps Magnetic Fields of ‘Lighthouse’ Pulsar

For the first time, scientists have used NASA’s IXPE (Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer) to directly measure the magnetic fields of PSR J1101−6101, a pulsar located within what is often referred to as the Lighthouse Nebula. The results provide new insight into the structure of some of the most extreme objects in the cosmos, as NASA continues to explore the secrets of how the universe works. A paper describing the results published Thursday in the Astrophysical Journal.

Scientists have successfully measured the magnetic field of the Lighthouse pulsar’s nebula using NASA’s IXPE. Their measurements confirm the theory that high-energy particles escape along the galaxy’s magnetic field lines. This composite image contains X-ray data from IXPE in blue (highlighted in the inset), the Chandra X-ray Observatory in purple, and radio data from CSIRO in green. The starfield is optical data from the 2MASS optical survey.

X-ray: Chandra: NASA/CXC/Stanford Univ./J.T. Dinsmore et al.; IXPE: NASA/MSFC/J.T. Dinsmore et al., Radio: CSIRO/ATNF/ATCA; Optical: 2MASS/UMass/IPAC-Caltech/NASA/NSF; Image processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/L. Frattare

Fast facts

A pulsar is a type of neutron star with a strong magnetic field that spins incredibly fast. The pulsar at the center of the Lighthouse Nebula is rotating 16 times per second.

Neutron stars are the leftover cores of massive stars, formed at the end of their life cycles, that possess more mass than the Sun. They are condensed down to the size of a city, making them natural laboratories for studying extreme physics.

Polarization is a property of light that describes the direction of its electric field vibrations. The polarization degree is a measurement of how aligned those vibrations are with each other.

In June 2025, IXPE spent nearly 18 days focused on the Lighthouse Nebula.

Astronomers studied two narrow X-ray offshoots extending from the pulsar to better understand how electrons at nearly the speed of light interact with this energetic system. The longer offshoot is known as the “filament,” and the shorter one is the “trail.”

When high-energy particles from the pulsar collide with the gas of interstellar space, they form a bow shock, like the bow wave formed at the front of a speeding boat. Most particles become trapped behind this bow shock, forming the turbulent trail behind the pulsar.

Researchers have suspected since 2008 that the highest-energy particles escape through this bow shock into interstellar space, flowing along the galaxy’s magnetic field lines to create the nebula’s long, thin filament.

“We wanted to test that theory,” said Jack Dinsmore, undergraduate student at Stanford University, who led the study. “The ‘smoking gun’ would come by measuring the polarization of the light, which indicates the magnetic field direction. If the magnetic field points along the filament, that confirms that the filament’s particles are flowing along the field.”

One challenge with these measurements is that the Lighthouse Nebula is relatively faint. To address this, IXPE scientists developed advanced analysis methods that use every bit of data, avoiding simplifying steps that could limit information. With these new tools and the new observations of the Lighthouse, the science team successfully measured the filament’s polarization. These techniques also gave a polarization measurement of the trail, and the pulsar’s emission signal.

Their analysis confirmed with more than 99% confidence that the magnetic field does indeed align with the particles’ flow.

While the parallel direction confirms models for the particle’s motion, the polarization degree was high enough to raise new questions.

“Many of the models for filaments assume strong magnetic turbulence,” said Roger Romani, a Stanford University professor who co-authored this paper. “The high polarization degree we measured indicates lower turbulence than such models require.”

The IXPE observations also showed that the magnetic field responsible for X-ray emission had to be parallel to the trail. However, the authors collected radio frequency observations showing a magnetic field pointing almost exactly perpendicular.

“The striking divergence in magnetic field orientations observed between radio and X-ray wavelengths provides compelling evidence for the highly structured nature of these objects,” said Niccolò Bucciantini of the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics and co-author of the study. “This marks the first clear indication that particles of different energies occupy distinct regions within the system, hinting at the presence of multiple, and potentially very different, acceleration mechanisms at work.”

More about IXPE

The IXPE mission, which continues to provide unprecedented data enabling groundbreaking discoveries about celestial objects across the universe, is a joint NASA and Italian Space Agency mission with partners and science collaborators in 12 countries. It is led by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, and BAE Systems, Inc. manages spacecraft operations together with the University of Colorado’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics in Boulder.

Learn more about IXPE’s ongoing mission here:

https://www.nasa.gov/ixpe

About the Author

Michael Allen

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Jul 09, 2026

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Lee Mohon

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Joel Wallace

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IXPE (Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer)

Astrophysics

Chandra X-Ray Observatory

Marshall Astrophysics

Marshall Space Flight Center

Nebulae

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I have used plenty of docking stations over the years, and it seems the desktop dock market is as crowded as ever. I have tested smaller portable docks, to larger stationary docks that give you all the ports you would ever need. But the new iVANKY FusionDock takes a different approach. Instead of just adding more ports, this Thunderbolt 5 dock is built around sustained reliability even while under heavy professional workloads. It can support multiple high-resolution displays, fast SSDs, NAS transfers, and full MacBook Pro performance all running simultaneously. If you are a power user and you need a powerful dock to match your workflow, the FusionDock Ultra is worth considering. Here’s why.

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Bridgestone spent 18 years getting its airless tire from prototype to street.

The debut tires run on self-driving golf carts for older residents in Higashiomi.

Cost and speed limits keep it far from ordinary passenger cars for now.

For almost two decades, Bridgestone has been chasing the formula for a workable airless tire , and after eighteen years of prototypes the company says it finally has one ready for the road. The catch is that you won’t be buying a set for your own car anytime soon, because the first commercial application is about as far from a performance application as it gets.

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The tire manufacturing juggernaut has launched its new AirFree tires on a fleet of self-driving vehicles operating in the Japanese city of Higashiomi, which look like stretched golf carts. These shuttles will ferry older residents around town, so the tires won’t exactly have a hard life. Even so, this marks the first time AirFree tires have entered regular commercial service rather than a limited-duration trial.

Read: Bridgestone Launches New Dedicated EV Tires For Teslas And Mustang Mach-E

Bridgestone built its first airless tire back in 2008 and unveiled the current third-generation version in 2023, so the technology on those go-karts represents eighteen years of steady refinement. Rather than lean on a hard material that might fail or ruin ride quality, the AirFree tires use a recyclable compound strong enough to handle daily use without turning every bump into a complaint.

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The construction relies on thermoplastic resin spokes wrapped in a thin rubber tread that meets the road. Bridgestone engineer Masaki Ota said the breakthrough arrived when the team stopped trying to make the material harder and turned instead to a flexible resin and a structure that spreads loads more evenly across the tire.

Not For Road Cars, For Now

Bridgestone

The tires were shown being put through their paces on the driverless go-karts to select members of the press earlier this week. These machines were limited to just 12 mph (20 km/h). It’s unclear whether they were capped at this speed for the comfort of attending journalists, or if that’s simply the maximum safe pace at which they were built to operate. Either way, Nikkei Asia reports that for now they suit only “relatively slow vehicles.”

As a result, these AirFree tires are nowhere near ready to replace the conventional rubber that current production cars rely on. Until the technology takes a meaningful step forward, expect to find tires like these only on small mobility fleets doing low-speed work in controlled settings.

As for the color, Bridgestone calls it ‘Empowering Blue,’ and says the vibrant shade was chosen to boost visibility during the day and at dusk.

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NASA astronaut Anil Menon and Roscosmos cosmonauts Pyotr Dubrov and Anna Kikina, Soyuz MS-29 prime crew members, pose for a portrait at the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Russia.

Credit: GCTC

NASA astronaut Anil Menon will launch aboard the Roscosmos Soyuz MS-29 spacecraft to the International Space Station on Tuesday, July 14, accompanied by cosmonauts Pyotr Dubrov and Anna Kikina, where they will join the Expedition 74 crew advancing scientific research.

Menon, Dubrov, and Kikina will lift off at 10:47 a.m. EDT (7:47 p.m. Baikonur time) from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Live launch and docking coverage is available on NASA+ , Amazon Prime , and the agency’s YouTube channel. Learn how to watch NASA content through a variety of online platforms, including social media.

After a two-orbit, three-hour trip to the station, the spacecraft will automatically dock at 1:56 p.m. to the Prichal module. Shortly afterward, hatches will open between the Soyuz and the orbiting laboratory.

Once aboard, the trio will join NASA astronauts Jessica Meir, Jack Hathaway, and Chris Williams, ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut Sophie Adenot, and Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Kud-Sverchkov, Sergei Mikaev, and Andrey Fedyaev.

NASA’s coverage schedule is as follows (all times Eastern and subject to change based on real-time operations):

Tuesday, July 14

9:45 a.m. – Launch coverage begins on NASA+ , Amazon Prime , and YouTube .

10:47 a.m. – Launch

1:10 p.m. – Rendezvous and docking coverage begins on NASA+ , Amazon Prime , and YouTube .

1:56 p.m. – Docking

3:30 p.m. – Hatch opening and welcome coverage begins on NASA+ , Amazon Prime , and YouTube .

3:55 p.m. – Hatch opening

Menon, Dubrov, and Kikina will spend about eight months aboard the orbital complex as International Space Station Expedition 74/75 crew members before returning to Earth in April 2027. This will be Menon’s first spaceflight and the second for both Dubrov and Kikina.

During his stay on the station, Menon will conduct scientific research and technology demonstrations aimed at advancing human space exploration and benefiting life on Earth. He will continue research to refine in-space production of semiconductor crystals to enable the large-scale manufacturing of components needed for high-performance computers, artificial intelligence, and improved medical devices. Menon also will perform ultrasound using augmented reality and artificial intelligence methods that could eliminate the need for medical support from Earth on future space missions. He will be a test subject helping researchers understand how blood flow is affected in space to protect future astronauts. He also will test bioprinting vascular constructs in microgravity to improve understanding of the aging process to advance therapeutic developments.

For more than 25 years, people have lived and worked continuously aboard the International Space Station, advancing scientific knowledge and making research breakthroughs not possible on Earth. The space station helps NASA understand and overcome the challenges of human spaceflight, expand commercial opportunities in low Earth orbit, and build on the foundation for long-duration missions to the Moon, as part of the Artemis program, and to Mars.

To learn more about International Space Station research, operations, and its crews, visit:

www.nasa.gov/station

-end-

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Headquarters, Washington

202-358-1100

joshua.a.finch@nasa.gov / james.j.russell@nasa.gov

Sandra Jones

Johnson Space Center, Houston

281-483-5111

sandra.p.jones@nasa.gov

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A years-long malaria control campaign in the Brazilian Amazon nearly eliminated the disease from a city — but then cases rebounded. Now, scientists think they've uncovered why.

The campaign took place in northern Brazil during the construction of the Belo Monte Dam in the Xingu River, one of the largest hydroelectric dams in the world. From 2013 to 2017, the initiative slashed annual malaria rates from more than 1,200 cases to fewer than 60. But the program ended, and within a few years, infections had rebounded to more than 700 cases a year. This time, they were concentrated in the rural communities surrounding the river in the city of Altamira.

In a study published Thursday (July 9) in the journal GeoHealth , scientists analyzed 15 years of malaria surveillance records alongside satellite images of forests around Altamira. Earlier studies have pointed to deforestation and dam construction as a driver of malaria because they can provide habitats for mosquito larvae, which inhabit the forest edge. In Altamira, large stretches of rainforest have been cleared for cattle ranching, logging and settlement along the Xingu River in the decades since the region was first opened up by road-building, leaving a patchwork of cleared land pressed up against the remaining forest.

However, the study found that the malaria resurgence wasn't simply a result of how much forest had been cut down. Instead, cases tracked most closely with the forest edge , the boundary where intact forest meets cleared or open land. There, mosquitoes get everything they need to thrive: shade from the tree line, sunlit pools of standing water for their larvae, and people living or working close by.

The findings highlight how the environment contributes to malaria risk, suggesting that maintaining surveillance in these high-risk landscapes could be just as important as driving cases down in the first place.

"What made Altamira compelling was that the timing gave us something rare, close to a natural experiment," study co-author Eloise Skinner, an epidemiologist and postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Queensland in Australia, told Live Science in an email. The results of that natural experiment could help Brazil in its efforts to eliminate malaria from the country in the next decade, she said.

A program tied to temporary funding

The researchers tracked malaria trends before, during and after the construction of the Belo Monte Dam. Before construction began, malaria was already a persistent problem in the region; Altamira city alone reported more than 1,200 cases a year.

As thousands of workers moved in, local health authorities and the dam's developers rolled out an intensive control program that involved spraying insecticides indoors, using mosquito nets, and deploying rapid diagnosis and treatment when cases did emerge. The goal was to head off outbreaks spread by Nyssorhynchus darlingi , the mosquito that carries the malaria-causing parasite in the Brazilian Amazon.

Mosquitoes pick up the parasite that causes malaria by feeding on the blood of infected people, and they can then spread that parasite to others they bite. Treating infected people quickly can help break that chain of transmission.

Cases plummeted despite the influx of workers, but once construction wrapped up and the program lost its funding, malaria came back.

Nyssorhynchus darlingi , the mosquito that spreads malaria in the Amazon, breeds in partially shaded bodies of water. (Image credit: Sabrina Simon) To understand what drove the resurgence, the researchers combined three streams of data. Case records came from Brazil's national malaria surveillance system and covered 150 health centers in Altamira over 15 years. The team layered on temperature, forest cover and rainfall data, since both shape how favorable an area is for mosquito breeding and how efficiently the malaria parasite develops inside mosquitos. Plus, they added an estimate of travel time between each cluster of cases and the nearest town, as a proxy for how easily people and the diseases they carry might move around.

From the observations, the forest edge consistently emerged as the strongest predictor of increased malaria cases. For every 1% increase in the perimeter of the forest edge, malaria cases rose by roughly 0.7%; for every 1% increase in Altamira's population, who are located at the forest edge, cases rose by about 1.4%.

The rebound wasn't evenly distributed. Before the dam was built, most of Altamira's malaria cases came from clusters inside the city itself. Afterward, that pattern flipped: by 2020, the roughly 700 annual cases were concentrated almost entirely in remote, rural clusters near forest edges. Meanwhile, Altamira's urban center stayed comparatively protected, much as it had during construction.

"When the funded program wound down, malaria came back to the communities that are hardest for the health system to reach," Skinner said. "The city stayed protected, most likely because fast diagnosis and treatment are easier to deliver and keep going in a town."

That leaves the same communities exposed twice over, Skinner said. The places that are already the hardest to reach with health services also sit where the ecological risk is the highest.

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But this pattern could point to solutions. The resurgence didn't scatter unpredictably. It came back to the same kind of place — rural communities at the forest edge — each time. That's the kind of risk that can be anticipated in the future.

Brazil aims to eliminate locally acquired malaria by 2035 . Skinner said Altamira's near elimination of the disease, and its rebound within a few years of the control program ending, is a warning for that effort. When a community contains a strong environmental driver for malaria, like forest-edge ecosystems, stopping a control program short is sure to let the disease climb back.

"Because the resurgence wasn't diffuse, we can predict where malaria is likely to return first," Skinner said. "The message for a 2035 goal isn't only that elimination needs sustained investment. It is that where the environment drives risk, that risk is predictable, and planning for it from the start is what lets the money go where it matters most."

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